IDG announced a new conference focusing on content syndication. The theme of the inaugural show will be RSS: Risk, Reward and Revolution. The conference is billed as executive-level, and created for content owners and producers, media execs, corporate marketers, advertisers and PR professionals.

Engagdget published a guide to podcasting (time-shifted syndicated online audio/radio type content developed and popularized by Dave Winer and Adam Curry) by Phillip Torrone back in October of this year (pretty fast out of the gate):

This week’s How-To is a three part special complete with our first Engadget “Podcast” MP3. The first part is how to get “Podcasts” on your iPod. So what’s a Podcast? To put it simply, a Podcast is an audio file, a MP3, most likely, in talk show format, along with a way to subscribe to the show and have it automatically delivered to your iPod when you plug in to iTunes. The show isn’t live, so you can listen to it whenever you want.
Doc Searls may have said it best: “PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.”

Clearing out an old TypePad test blog, I’m porting over some relevant comments from the beta, such as this one from when I noticed that there was no built-in aggregrator (I misplaced the date, but it was sometime in 2003 and I’m though filing a few others around their original datestamps in the RFB chronolog, I’ll just quote this one here):

The market for weblog/syndicated newsfeed readers (often called aggregators) has really expanded in the last year, and it’s about time somebody started comparing and contrasting them, especially since TypePad doesn’t have a built-in syndicated feed reader (nor does Zempt), but some of the aggregators do include tools for posting.
Aggregators include Radio UserLand, Ranchero NetNewsWire (for Mac), SharpReader and FeedDemon (for Windows), hosted services like syndic8 and newsisfree, and NewsMonster, which plugs into Mozilla.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a few, but someone should start comparing and contrasting them and recommending one to TypePad users, no?

Laura Lemay isn’t the first person to point out that the blogosphere seems to be gradually reinventing the USENET netnews feature set (feeds == usenet), but it’s fun to read her make these points:

Why am I noting these things? Issues of distributing news in either a one-to-many fashion or peer-to-peer, or of uniquely identifying a single post: this is stuff that the people who did Usenet figured out nearly fifteen years ago.

There are differences in the architecture, though, aren’t there? Yes, netnews was widely distributed, store-and-forward, scaled extremely well (technically, if not socially), but it put forum-conversation style communication at the center of its model, whereas the blog conversations explode or decentralize things even further, encouraging each person to host and support their own words (although there is the problem of stray unindexed comments elsewhere).

Also, blogs and webfeeds rely entirely on HTTP, that great firewall exception.

Most importantly, there’s the whole Pirillo case that RSS solves the email spam problem by being entirely opt-in.

Would it also solve the USENET spam problem by the same virtues, or is there some direct connection between the scaleability of netnews and its openness to spam?

Greater minds than mine (who don’t have overdue galley corrections) will have to ponder this.

Jon Udell, one of the deeper thinkers around on matters of weblog, syndication, journalism, and information overload has come up with some important “best practices” suggestions for structuring weblog entries to facilitate efficient scanning by readers trying to follow many information sources through their RSS feeds, in Heads, Decks, and Leads:

I’m reversing my former stance on truncation. Here is a Wall Street Journal view of all of my feeds so far today. And here is a full-content view of all of my feeds so far today. It includes this long item I’m now writing, which shows how a mixture of truncated and untruncated content is optimal for neither scanning nor for reading.
Here are my conclusions:

Nobody needs to truncate feeds in order to enable front-page views (although some will still want to in order to drive traffic to websites).

Everybody’s content should be HTML (if not XHTML).

Authors should think of the first HTML element (normally a paragraph, but could be a list or a blockquote or something else) as special: the lead, or deck, that will appear in a front-page view.

Feedreaders should XHTML-ize what they read.

Feedreaders should then offer a front-page view (e.g., just the first HTML element found in each item) as well as a full-content view.

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